SIMULATED TRAGEDY DRIVES HOME POINT

Tim Tierney, Tribune Staff WriterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

With Lemont High School's 780 students watching from the nearby hill, the school's main parking lot was turned into a scene of tragedy Friday morning as officials staged a head-on collision to drive home a point: Don't drink and drive.

The two-hour mock crash and lecture was called "Operation Prom Night," which was the brainchild of Lemont firefighter/paramedic Shawn Collins.

Collins suggested the idea months ago to Jeff Lehr, director of the Lemont Fire Protection Bureau, and the project was implemented just one week before the students' actual prom night.

"We're not asking them if they drink at the prom to not drive. We're telling them to not drink at all," said Collins.

Lemont's entire student body strolled toward the hill Friday morning expecting a school assembly, but instead found tarpaulins covering two vehicles. The event began as the mock crash was called into police and the audio was broadcast to the students and teachers.

The time of the accident was 11:30 p.m. Friday, the night of the school prom. One of the cars carried two couples returning home from a prom party. The couples had been drinking and the driver was drunk, Collins said. The other vehicle was driven by a father with his two children.

Lemont Detective Tom Fink was the first to arrive at the scene as the driver of the teenagers' car tried to hide a 12-pack of beer under his car. That amused some of the students as they watched from the hill, but the mood became more somber as the event unfolded.

Soon, three ambulances and two fire trucks had pulled into the parking lot. Firefighters and paramedics hurried about the scene in an effort to save the crash victims. One person had to be cut from the back seat of the teenagers' car and one of the man's children had to be cut from his station wagon.

The father anguished over his bloodied son as he lay motionless on the pavement. The son and the girl on the hood were dead at the scene and the boy in the back seat of the teens' car would die later, Collins said.

A few minutes went by before a hearse pulled into the lot. Firefighters took the girl's body off the hood of the car and helped the funeral home official put the girl in a body bag. The crowd was suddenly very quiet.

"Then they were thinking, `Hey this is serious,' " said junior Matt Ludwig, who played the drunken teenage driver.

After the mock crash scenario, which lasted about 20 minutes, the students went into the gymnasium to hear several lectures. First was a 45-minute talk and slide presentation from Tony Bucki, who said he has seen many accident victims as chief of the emergency room at Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

Bucki showed slides of teenagers who were the victims of accidents involving drunken drivers. Some were paralyzed, others permanently disfigured.

Terry Reger of Homer Township, whose oldest daughter, Amy, was killed in a 1993 car crash caused by a drunken driver, also spoke to the students.

Reger's husband was killed in a car accident on his way home from work in November 1990. In October 1993, Amy was killed. Amy was a senior tennis star at Providence High School in New Lenox and had planned to go to college to study nursing.